Amazing Casting Products: #Cre8time Play with Nuts and Bolts for Mold Rubber Monday... by Susan M. Brown {sbartist}

Monday, March 17

#Cre8time Play with Nuts and Bolts for Mold Rubber Monday... by Susan M. Brown {sbartist}

Good evening Amazing Crafters! Susan dropping by for Mold Rubber Monday. Today I'm going to share a little collaborative project I have been working on with Tina Walker of Frog Dog Studio. Together, we joined creative forces to hand-make hundreds of screws, bolts and other hardware baubles that were included in the March Frog Dog Studio Kits. This project started with two molds using Amazing Mold Rubber... and then the AMAZING crafting ensued.

With the hardware selected, I prepared a mold box for the similar sized bolts – constructed from a cylinder of paper hot glued to a recycled plastic container lid. I also hot glued the bolts, screw end down to the lid base. I prepared an entire container of Amazing Mold Rubber to create two molds {please CLICK HERE to view mixing/preparation}.

**NOTE TO SELF**

Don't do it this way next time!

Why, you ask??! Because I had to cut multiple slices into the mold to free each and every bolt from the mold. I can pour resin into the mold, but now since I had to slice numerous cuts to release bolts, I get a lot of air bubbles along the screw threads. Oh well, it was a learning experience... back to the drawing board. I remade the mold of bolts using the next process.

For the second of the molds created for the smaller nuts and other hardware... I tried a different approach – this way works much better! YAY!!! I remade the mold for the bolts this way with the bolt heads down and the screw posts facing up. In the photo above, the mold box is a round metal tin lid that is about 3/4" deep. I sprayed a generous coating of 3M Spray Mount and let it tack up {meaning I set it aside to dry for about 10 minutes}.

Then I rubbed the inside the center of each nut and wingnut with a Q-tip coated with olive oil spray for ease of mold release. I pressed each item into the spray adhesive and then poured the Amazing Mold Rubber over slowly. I gently poked around inside of each nut center to release any air bubbles then set aside to cure. This made a perfect mold – so I repeated for mass production.

I repeated this to create molds with numerous pieces of various hardware. The wingnuts proved a little difficult to pour resin into without trapping air bubbles, so I created another mold just for them using Amazing Mold Putty. This left the wings open for ease in pouring resin.

Now it was time for casting our pieces in Amazing Casting Resin, over and over and over... even in white - the metal hardware look like works of art... but completely ready to be dyed, painted, inked, sprayed or rusted for addition to any mixed media creation.

So with a little planning, you can make molds with multiples of items for casting with ease.